Cleft prediction before birth using deep neural network

• Published in: Health informatics journal 2020-12, Vol.26 (4), p.2568-2585
• Main Authors: Shafi, Numan, Bukhari, Faisal, Iqbal, Waheed, Almustafa, Khaled Mohamad, Asif, Muhammad, Nawaz, Zubair
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Birth defects; Developing countries; LDCs; Machine learning; Neural networks
• ISSN: 1460-4582; 1741-2811
• DOI: 10.1177/1460458220911789

In developing countries like Pakistan, cleft surgery is expensive for families, and the child also experiences much pain. In this article, we propose a machine learning–based solution to avoid cleft in the mother’s womb. The possibility of cleft lip and palate in embryos can be predicted before birth by using the proposed solution. We collected 1000 pregnant female samples from three different hospitals in Lahore, Punjab. A questionnaire has been designed to obtain a variety of data, such as gender, parenting, family history of cleft, the order of birth, the number of children, midwives counseling, miscarriage history, parent smoking, and physician visits. Different cleaning, scaling, and feature selection methods have been applied to the data collected. After selecting the best features from the cleft data, various machine learning algorithms were used, including random forest, k-nearest neighbor, decision tree, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron. In our implementation, multilayer perceptron is a deep neural network, which yields excellent results for the cleft dataset compared to the other methods. We achieved 92.6% accuracy on test data based on the multilayer perceptron model. Our promising results of predictions would help to fight future clefts for children who would have cleft.